Just part of the party

“Soloist” isn’t quite the right word for Ara Gregorian’s job at Saturday’s Lansing Symphony Orchestra concert, and not just because he will share the spotlight with his wife, Hye-Jin Kim.

In Mozart’s exquisite Sinfonia Concertante, Gregorian’s viola and Kim’s violin will dissolve into a hypnotic tapestry that defies classification. Voices from the wind section will glide alongside the two soloists like dolphins swimming alongside a sailing ship, surfacing and disappearing into the harmonic swells.

“It’s exactly like chamber music,” Gregorian said. “Not just with the interplay of the violin and viola, but there are so many phrases passed between the instruments of the orchestra.”

The music transcends form, not just because it’s a hybrid of symphony and chamber music.

“The slow movement was written after his mother’s death, and it’s filled with unbelievably poignant sentiment,” Gregorian said.

If a part of that slow movement (specifically, bars 58 to 61) releases a weird bubble into your brain, it may be a sense memory of the music that follows each death in Peter Greenaway’s morbid 1988 movie “Drowning by Numbers.” (That’s why the scary little girl on the swing chants “58,” but I digress.)

Gregorian and Kim relish any chance to play the piece together, as they did last month with the Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle in Durham, North Carolina.

As husband and wife, Gregorian and Kim are in a unique position to mix the “all-consuming” job of making music with domestic and professional life. They’re both faculty members at East Carolina University and perform together frequently at summer music festivals and chamber concerts.

“We love it all,” Gregorian said. “I feel like I know her playing. I know what she’s going to do, and I hope it’s the same with her.”

They’ve never felt the need to restrict shop talk offstage.

“We let it come up as it comes up,” he said. “No lines drawn in the sand. You can get intense and very passionate about music, and, being a married couple, sometimes you have to be careful about that, but we’ve done it a long time, and we know the ins and outs.” 

Gregorian first fell in love with Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in his teens, after a trip to a local record store with his famous father.

He’s the son of Leon Gregorian, who directed MSU’s orchestras for 28 years, and Linda Gregorian, a musician and teacher who has played viola in the LSO since 1985.

Ara Gregorian attended East Lansing High School and went to MSU for two years before going on to Juilliard. He misses places like El Azteco and the now-defunct Bilbo’s Pizza. 

His parents started him on violin when he was 4 years old but didn’t push him to become a professional musician.

“They let me come to it myself, to decide to make that investment,” he said. “I just feel fortunate to have grown up around music all the time. That brings a lot to what I do now.”

He keeps a busy schedule of teaching and performing, especially in chamber settings, and has played around the world, including in Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Shanghai and points well beyond.

At the invitation of a former student from Mongolia, he gave a solo recital in the nation’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, playing a Bruch violin concerto at the National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet.

“That’s one of the amazing things about being a musician,” he said. “We get to travel to such amazing places, share what we do and learn from being in those places. People everywhere love music.”

This month, Gregorian is busy putting together North Carolina’s Four Seasons Chamber Music Festival, which he founded and directs.

After Saturday’s concert at the Wharton Center, there’s bound to be a Gregorian family reunion, which may or may not take place at El Azteco.

The LSO concert is anchored by a pairing of seemingly simpatico works. It’s obvious why music director Timothy Muffitt chose to follow Mozart with Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9.

The Soviet-era composer is famous for epic, dreadnought-class symphonies freighted with angst, but he double-crossed everyone with his unexpectedly nimble, classically proportioned Ninth — or so the experts say. 

But don’t be lulled. The doorman may usher you into the foyer with brisk, Mozartean flourishes, but this is still Shostakovich’s Stalin-haunted funhouse. The only big difference between his Ninth and the longer symphonies is its crazy-short attention span.

Silly piccolo trills and forced hippity-hops of merriment give way to a leaden trombone chorus that huffs and flexes like the Russian Olympic weightlifting team. A queasy, mysterious meditation calls to mind dancers from a Tchaikovsky ballet straying into an icy chamber from Franz Kafka’s “The Castle.” The last movement channel surfs without mercy, flipping from solo bassoon musings to Viennese dance flourishes to strumming balalaikas to the tank battle of Kursk. It all ends in an amphetamine-driven clown car crash and elephant stampede that must be heard to be believed. Mozart was never like this.